The festival begins on Wednesday, May 20, at the Westway in the Meatpacking District, where Karl Ove Knausgaard’s reunited college band, Lemen, will take the stage. James Wood’s band, the Fun Stuff, will perform, too, and Lydia Davis will begin the night in conversation with Dag Solstad about writing family history. Solstad is one of Norway’s preeminent writers, the author of thirty-three books translated into thirty languages. Davis learned Norwegian by reading his latest novel, a four-hundred-page epic whose title translates, roughly, as The Insoluble Epic Element in Telemark in the Period 1591–1896. Read More

“I’ve been reading Knausgaard,” I’ve heard on more than one occasion, over this Scandinavian-grade winter, from a friend across a barroom table. And a few minutes into the conversation, almost inevitably: “There’s this part in the third book about taking a shit … ”

It came as no surprise that my friends wanted to talk My Struggle, the Norwegian novelist’s opus on the everyday in six volumes. (The fourth is out in English translation today.) But the number of those friends who zeroed in on Knausgaard’s excretory musings was another matter.

And it’s not just My Struggle. The subject reemerged earlier this year when The New York Times Magazine published “My Saga,” Knausgaard’s two–part North American travelogue, in which a jaunt on the john in a Newfoundland hotel leaves him with a hopelessly clogged toilet. He recounts the aftermath at length. The episode was at the center of Knausgaard talk.

Lest readers think this focus is a factor of the company I keep—that I surround myself with prudish types offended by bathroom scenes, fetishists attracted to them, or the scatological-humor crowd—I direct them to James Wood, a critic at a venue no less proper than TheNew Yorker. In an interview with Knausgaard published in the Winter 2014 issue of The Paris Review, Wood says, Read More

Our Spring Revel was last Tuesday, and it was, as Gay Talese put it simply, “a real party,” a party for the ages. About five hundred of us gathered at Cipriani 42nd Street to honor Norman Rush with the Hadada Award, presented by James Wood, who recited one of my favorite jokes from Subtle Bodies: “Pinot noir meant don’t urinate at night.”

Hilary Mantel took the stage to award Atticus Lish the Plimpton Prize for Fiction; “I am extremely fortunate to receive this award,” Lish said, “as is anyone who receives recognition in any field. Few people get much of a gold star no matter what they do in life.”

Mark Leyner received the Terry Southern Prize for Humor—which he has publicly promised to hang above his bed, like a mobile—from Donald Antrim. Never in recorded history have the words Sugar-frosted nutsack been uttered before so large and so gracious a crowd. Last, The Paris Review bade a fond farewell to our longtime publisher, Antonio Weiss, who has absconded to Washington to serve as the counselor to the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. Our loss is the nation’s gain.

Richard Price talks to David Simon about crime, television, crime on television, and his father as a less-than-ideal reader: “I ran into him about three months after [my first novel] came out. It was one o’clock in the afternoon and he said, ‘Come on, let’s get a Tequila Sunrise’—you know, it’s 1974—or a Harvey Wallbanger or something. He said, ‘Yeah, I got the book, I read it, you know, it wasn’t like a good book or anything.’ I said, ‘Oh … ’ ”

James Wood, literary evangelical, defends books as a religion: “By fixing on humdrum domestic details, novels, [Wood] says, redeem life and rescue it from its sad ephemerality; a book is not solitary, like the person who reads it, but dispenses ‘proximity, fellow-feeling, compassion, communion … I am taking a religious view of a form that’s very earthly, and there’s some tension between my approach and that worldliness.’ ”

Punk music has thrived in plenty of unlikely places, but Siberia embraced its ethos as nowhere else could, providing “the perfect incubator for nurturing the creative malice punk requires … Lacking any official rock clubs in Siberia, punks colonized cafeterias, apartments, libraries and local ‘Houses of Culture’—the Soviet equivalent to VFW halls. Dorm rooms hosted entire rock festivals.” (But the bands couldn’t put on the punk uniform: “In Siberia, if you looked like that on the street, you wouldn’t be able to walk more than 100 meters. After that, someone would just take you around the corner and beat the shit out of you.”)

Umberto Eco’s How to Write a Thesis, first published in 1977, has at last arrived in English. It’s about “what the thesis represents: a magical process of self-realization, a kind of careful, curious engagement with the world that need not end in one’s early twenties.”

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That photo on the cover comes from Marc Yankus, whose subject is New York buildings: “I can feel the brick, I can feel the hardness and the corners of the building … the structure, the monolith, the sculpture, the abstract.”

In the Art of Memoir No. 2, Vivian Gornick talks about feminism, bad reviews, love versus work, and coming to terms with failure:

I knew I had to stay with it as long as it took to write a sentence I could respect. That’s the hardest thing in the world to do—to stay with a sentence until it has said what it should say, and then to know when that has been accomplished.

And in the Art of Screenwriting No. 5, Michael Haneke reveals the imaginative process behind movies like The White Ribbon and Amour—and why there are no “right” readings of his films:

I would never set out to make a political film. I hope that my films provoke reflection and have an illuminating quality—that, of course, may have a political effect. Still, I despise films that have a political agenda. Their intent is always to manipulate, to convince the viewer of their respective ideologies. Ideologies, however, are artistically uninteresting. I always say that if something can be reduced to one clear concept, it is artistically dead.

For the last two years, a small group of American writers and critics has convened in Oslo for a series of informal lectures, interviews, and discussions. Dubbed the Norwegian-American Literary Festival, this unlikely gathering has introduced packed houses to the likes of Donald Antrim, Elif Batuman, Lydia Davis, Sam Lipsyte, and John Jeremiah Sullivan, and—on the American side—has helped spread word of contemporary Norwegian masters including Karl Ove Knausgaard, Joachim Trier, and Turbonegro.

Now, for one night only, The Paris Review is proud to welcome the Norwegian-American Literary Festival to New York.

On Wednesday, May 28, join us at Chez André in the East Village to hear Claire Messud and James Wood in conversation with the Norwegian novelist Linn Ullmann, followed by rare musical performances by James Wood and John Jeremiah Sullivan. Liquid refreshments will be served.